lace

In September of 2017 the amazing book TAPA was launched in Paris. I was privileged to be one of the book’s many authors, and asked to write about the bark cloth on my former home island of Atiu (left). I was also invited to exhibit some of my works for the occasion (below a detail of my tapa-lace panel with Marquesan dance costumes in the background).

During the exhibition I met French artist and art restorer Marion Dumaine. Marion exhibited lengths of Tongan tapa beautifully decorated with natural pigments and gold leaf. Being both interested in barkcloth, the idea arose to meet in August 2018 and hold an experimental workshop. My German girlfriend Christel Weingart, felt artist, painter and published author, who had used barkcloth in a sculptural way many years ago, would also join us. Raymond and Colette Cristini offered us free of charge their lovely summer house in Tarascon sur Ariège (France) for our experiments. Our first interest was to check if there were any suitable plants growing in Europe whose inner bark could be successfully beaten into usable sheets. Marion’s cousin had had to cut down a fig tree, ficus carica, one of the many fig species and thus distantly related to the plant family from which tapa is being made in the South Pacific islands and other areas. They had kept some branches for us to explore.

We boiled these in water for three hours (left: Christel checking on the branches) and spent an entire day shaving off the outer bark. The bast could be removed and smelled, felt and looked just like that of the Banyan roots I had worked with in the Cook Islands. We fermented it for a day, as I had done on Atiu, to make beating of the rather coarse bark easier.

However when beating it, it did not stay in one piece, but dissolved into bundles of tangled fibres. So we learned our first lesson: not all fig bast is suitable for tapa making.

Marion brought some Philodendron roots from her giant plant at home to try out. It was a fiddly enterprise to shave off the outer bark. The best way of removing the inner wooden core was to just beat the root flat. When fresh, it had beautiful rusty and pink colours, however these dried into beige and brown once dry.

I took some blueprinted tapa with me which I wanted to felt into a freshly beaten length of tapa. Colette, our hostess, had brought us bundles of dried Broussonetia papyrifera (Paper Mulberry) bark from her home island of Futuna. We were grateful that Michel Charleux, the editor of the TAPA book, let us have the Marquesan-style anvil which had served for tapa demonstrations during the Paris book launch exhibition. Once the bast was beaten thin, I removed some slivers from the cyan-dyed tapa pieces and beat them into the white tapa. It worked wonderfully.

Encouraged by Marion’s experiments with the Philodendron roots, I decided to experiment with mauve coloured Rose of Sharon petals. The delicate upper parts were easy to felt into the bast, the thicker maroon centers not so well. However in the end, most of the petals had merged with the bark.

We decided to beat all strips of bark which we had already soaked in water. Both Marion and I were interested in achieving a lacy effect (left) for use in future artworks .

Meanwhile Christel had been using pieces of tapa to fashion some delightful three dimensional artifacts. I had seen Christel’s tapa bowls when I first met her in 2003 and had been keen to learn from her how to make them.

Over a ceramic bowl, with the help of cling film, water and cellulose glue she formed delicate vessels (left), decorated with spirals and some of the fig bast fibres from our previous experiment (right). They were especially impressive when seen in their delicate beauty against the light and blue sky of Tarascon’s summer.This was my chance and now I knew what I wanted to do with the cyan-dyed tapa pieces.

The blue and white patterns reminded of Delftware. After the first bowl I became more adventurous. I discovered that the pieces were double-layered and that using both layers made the bowl too opaque for what I wanted to achieve. I also used the inner, plain layer and adorned it with the remnants of the previous bowl.

Now, back in Terrassa, the three bowls I made in this enjoyable experimental workshop adorn my book shelf. They may become part of an exhibition I am hoping to have some day…

…is the motto of the exhibition. And surely, for me this much appreciated challenge has been a step forward.

Going back to the beginning: newspaper as material. Cool!. How could I use it? It was clear that it would have to be “my way”, i.e. sewn lace. However paper is fragile. What to do about it?

I could print a newspaper extract onto fabric (left).I wanted it to be a meaningful text, though. Where would I find one in such a short time? And then, what to do with that text? Hmmm, somehow that wasn’t convincing.The technical question was, how to stabilise paper? With iron-on interfacing (above).

Yes, this did work, however, where was the message? I could look for meaningful words. Which language should I use? German – my native language, English – a language I sometimes find easier to work in (!), Castellano – the country’s language, or Catalán – the regional language I am only just beginning to learn and love?

No! All the languages I speak, I decided. Then I went in search of international newspapers.Many interesting articles later I had a good collection of words I could use. I arranged them so they’d transcend the confines of the frame (left). The words could be sewn (right)…

However, that turned out to be too labour-intensive for the short time period, so this will become a separate project to be continued…

In the end I found words that satisfied me and joined them with machine-sewn lace. I didn’t much like the frame and thought that the natural wood colour made it stand out too much. White paint was the answer. For weeks my workroom smelled of paint! However, it did the trick. I drilled holes in the frame to attach the lace with beads (right).

And, voilà, the work was finished. The title came easily: Between Wor(l)ds – my favourite space to be.

My work can be seen during the four days of the Festa Major (city festival) de Matadepera at the Casal de Cultura (culture centre) – between other interesting works of local artists who have also submitted to the challgenge of frame and newspaper. We have all done “un pas més” – another step.

… for a new project

Tongan tapa is predominantly Broussonetia papyrifera or paper mulberry. It is the finest I’ve known, with the exception of a gauze-like piece of tapa from Fiji (left) that I saw at the recent Tapa Festival in Tahiti in November 2014 . For me as lace maker and tapa enthusiast, using this natural material is an ongoing challenge.

A friend brought me some unpainted tapa (feta’aki) from Tonga. I haven’t measured the cloth, but it is about 1.20 metres wide and many metres long. Length and width of individual strips depend on the size of the sapling that has been harvested for beating. It varies slightly.

Tapa makers in Tonga layer and join those individual strips to make a larger piece for their final printed ngatu.

Any holes and tears are patched by pasting small pieces of tapa over the area with starch.

When holding up against the light and looking through such cloth, the doubled areas form quite a pattern – and tell a tale of the tapa’s quality perhaps…

My plan for a new project is to dye this paper mulberry tapa with fabric dye. I assume that the contact with the liquid dye will dissolve the starch and the joints and patches will come apart. I prefer to work with the individual layers and their ‘imperfection’ anyway. Luckily we have a rather deep shower tray, because my large plastic basin is too small to submerge the long feta’aki in enough water to soak it.

As soon as the water penetrates the material I can already see that the pieces separate. After agitating the bark gently, because wet tapa has very little tensile strength and can easily be ripped, I can take out the separate lengths of bark. I gently squeeze them, roll them up in a thick towel and wring that towel-tapa sausage to get rid of as much water as I can before spreading the bark on a table to dry. I have covered our studio table with sheets.

It’s a bit like detective work to discover how many larger and smaller pieces hide in such a squeezed-out ‘snake’.

I find out that it’s usually two, sometimes three lengths that have most probably been beaten together. The bottom part of the bark is much thicker, the top usually very delicate and lacy. That’s why they are placed so that the bottom part of the one comes to ly on the top part of the other and thus give an even thickness.

I have to find the beginning of one separate layer and pull or lift the piece and let gravity do its job.

I love the contact with such, at this stage, very delicate material. I find that I have to respect its specific properties, if I want it to work for me and through handling it I get to know its strengths and weaknesses – and my own.

Eventually all possible flat surfaces of my large studio are covered with fine tapa. Swimming in the bowl near the water’s surface are the fallen off patches. I skim them off, spread and flatten them, long and narrow, square and rectangular, hand-size and smaller, placing them in the spaces between the other longer strips. In my mind’s eye, the new work begins to grow. All I need now for the colouring is a day of sunshine which is required to develop the light-reactive dyes full brilliance.

Now that I have a better idea which parts of the Edna will help me harvest successful rust prints, I feel brave enough to experiment with some samples of tapa (barkcloth). They are left-overs from previous projects. White cloth from Paper Mulberry bark (Broussonetia papyrifera, locally called aute) is precious for me, because it has been extinct on Atiu and I have only just recently planted three seedlings which I got from Rarotonga. They are not yet tall enough to use. My sample pieces have been produced in Samoa and Tonga.

One is a leftover from my Third Space installation. Parts of it are filled with machine-sewn lace.

A long white strip seems ideal to wind around my rusty rod.When I return the next day, I’m rewarded with lovely orange stains.Even the Polyester thread in the lace has taken on colour.

The first two tapa strips seen in the image on top were used in a previous eco-dye experiment. They clearly show the resist marks and brown dye. I’ve been wondering what will happen to those pre-dyed strips which have not been rinsed after dyeing. Will they still contain the dye’s magic? Will the tannin in the eucalyptus dye react with the rust? My guess is that this should produce black stains. After I have taken off my nicely rusted white tapa strip, I apply the two dyed pieces to my rusty rod. Now I will have to be patient for a day or so…